1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an integrated circuit (IC) apparatus and a manufacturing process thereof, and more particularly to a semiconductor apparatus system having a furnace apparatus and to a method of a semiconductor process including a furnace process.
2. Description of Related Art
During the fabrication of ICs, a lot of processes require a high temperature environment, such as a thermal diffusion process for doping ions, a thermal oxidation process for growing an oxidation layer, and an annealing process for eliminating defects.
The above-mentioned thermal treatment processes are usually implemented by disposing wafers on a wafer boat and transporting the same into a furnace for reactions. After the reactions are completed, the wafers are then taken out. Besides, when a next furnace process is performed, the same lot of the wafers disposed on the wafer boat is transported to a furnace again, and the wafers are also taken out after the reactions are completed.
In general, the internal wafer boat is partitioned into a plurality of grids (wafer slots) for carrying a plurality of the wafers. Each of the wafer slots has three pins disposed on a horizontal plane of the wafer boat. In detail, the wafers are in direct contact with the pins in the wafer boat and are fixedly placed in the wafer slots of the wafer boat due to support of the pins. Nevertheless, after an implementation of a high temperature furnace process, damages to contacting areas between the wafer boat and the wafers may arise. For example, material defects including dislocations and slips may occur on the wafers. Particularly, the contacting areas between the wafer boat and the wafers remain constant in different furnace processes. Therefore, after a plurality of the high temperature furnace processes is performed, the damages to the wafers may be increased because of the high temperature. As such, stability of subsequent manufacturing processes may be significantly reduced, even giving rise to a negative impact on reliability and yield of the devices and the products.